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• Desktop motion capture
  Presentations with moving mouse pointers, scrolling windows, page turning, animation, and action often engage the user's attention and are an excellent way to illustrate Tuscany in action
  • Camstudio Camstudio is an open source video product. Free to use. Donations accepted. This software can record your mousing, page turning, and web surfing. Be aware that this program only captures live demos, so your demonstration and speaking skills will be recorded in real time. Use the Microsfot Video 1 codec to ensure easy transportability. An example Camstudio Motion Capture Demo with computer desktop video and sound is attached.
  • Camtasia Studio. Camtasia is excellent for captuing desktop actions
  • Wink (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/). Freeware. Allows thought audio recording, text, balloons, editing, scripting. This software is excellent for recording scripted demos. In other words, you can record your presentation, and then go back to each screen capture and add audio or text balloons. With this method you can do multiple takes, and edit out any misstatements or mistakes. You can also edit out parts of the demo if your make a demo mistake. The program saves to ShockWave Flash (SWF) file format.

An example Camstudio Motion Capture Demo with computer desktop video and sound is attachedAs with video capture, it is important to consider the screen size for your audience and whether you want the presentation to be fixed size or resizeable. Desktop captures, especially detailed windows such as the Eclipse development platform, degrade in quality when resized or made too small making fonts impossible to read. The best screen quality comes from a fixed screen size at a size that is slightly smaller than your minimum user's screen (to allow for window borders and presentation controls). To make a fixed size presentation window, embed the presentation as an object with a fixed size in a web page. If you just hand the audiience an AVI or SWF file, they will resize it in their browser or player, and this will cause distortion. For presentation size, 800x600 and 1024x768 are common low-end laptop display sizes. Therefore 1000x750 (slighty smaller than 1024x768) makes a good fixed presentation window size.

Editing and Compiling Assets

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